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Black and white headshot of author Erin Blakemore

Erin Blakemore

Erin Blakemore is a Boulder, Colorado-based journalist Her debut book, The Heroine’s Bookshelf (Harper), won a Colorado Book Award for Nonfiction and has been translated into Italian, Korean and Portuguese. Erin has written about history and culture and other topics for Smithsonian.com, The Washington Post, TIME, mental_floss, NPR’s This I Believe, The Onion, Popular Science, Modern Farmer and other journals. You can find more of her work at erinblakemore.com.

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Ghostbusters (1984) Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis Credit: Columbia/Courtesy Neal Peters Collection
Arts & Culture

How “Ghostbusters” Changed the Way We Speak

A controversial and little-known aspect of Ghostbusters cultural influence can be found in a seemingly simple suffix, “-busters.”
A glass slipper
Arts & Culture

Interrogating “Cinderella”

Cinderella, the ever-changing fairytale, inspires no shortage of analysis and debate.
"We Are The World" album cover
Arts & Culture

“We Are the World, We Are the Children” (Or Are We?)

Megahit "We are the world" turns 30 this year.
Gerda Lerner
Politics & History

Dispatches From the Beginning of Women’s History

The origins of Women's History Month.
Sara Plummer Lemmon Botanist
Plants & Animals

Sara Plummer Lemmon: Pioneering Botanist

Botany didn’t just intrigue and entertain Sara Plummer Lemmon—it deeply affected her personal life.
Army unit at the parade
Art & Art History

Who Owns Nazi-era Art?

To understand why stolen art continues to be a contentious issue well into the 21st century, it makes sense to take a look into how and why Nazis “collected” (read: stole) Jewish-owned art.
Hellen Keller and Mark Twain in side by side black and white photographs
Arts & Culture

History’s Other Odd Couple: Mark Twain and Helen Keller

Helen Keller and Mark Twain's unusual friendship.
Josephine Baker laying on top of a tiger rug in black and white
Arts & Culture

The Fuss About Josephine Baker

 A new one-woman Broadway show puts Josephine Baker back in the public consciousness.
Still from The Sound of Music showing the von Trapp family sprawled out and circling a guitar-playing Maria
Arts & Culture

“The Sound of Music” at 50

Iconic musical "The Sound of Music" celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Black and white close-up of Clara Bow in profile
Arts & Culture

Before There Was ’50 Shades’…There Was Elinor Glyn’s ‘It’

A writer named Elinor Glyn wrote a novel entitled "It and other stories in 1927"
A book opened to the title page of Dr. Zhivago
Arts & Culture

Why Boris Pasternak Rejected His Nobel Prize

The noted Russian author was forced to choose between his homeland and international recognition of his poetry and fiction.
Politics & History

Carter G. Woodson, The Father of Black History Month

The origins of Black History Month date back to 1926, when a historian named Carter G. Woodson spearheaded “Negro History Week.”
Black and white headshot of Sylvia Plath
Arts & Culture

Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel,” 50 Years Later

Published in 1965, Ariel was published after Sylvia Plath herself had already been dead for two years.
Blurred figures of people walking
Arts & Culture

What Price Fast Fashion?

Fast fashion is a phenomenon that transcends the runway, crosses borders, and cuts across barriers of class, culture, and emerging economies
By Unknown; distributed by Epoch Film Co. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Arts & Culture

“Birth of a Nation”: 100 Years Later

The Birth of a Nation—1915's blockbuster hit and the most popular movie of its day—was released 100 years ago this month.
The car token at the starting square of the Monopoly board game
Arts & Culture

What’s in a Game? Monopoly at 80

The real-estate game Monopoly turns 80 in 2015
Scene of a parade from the 2014 movie Annie.
Arts & Culture

Our Obsession with Orphans: A Short History from Jane Eyre to Annie

Little Orphan Annie is the latest in a sequence of pop culture foundlings, but America’s orphans of the Great Depression weren’t endearing at all.

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